iBook - Multiple Hard Drive Failures

I have had three hard drive failures recently on my G4 Ibook and I am trying to figure out if this is logic board issue or three bad drives. My original failed and then two 160gb hitachi drives were installed and each crashed within a day. I have an external drive installed which works fine. Once the internal drives crash I cannot get access to them to run disc utilities. Occasionally they appear on the desktop and when I run the apple hardware test, i once got a hardware failure code. The latest hard drive to fail started clicking and then died, also indicating a hard drive failure rather than a logic board issue. It is possible something in the ata controller or ribbon is causing them to crash?? Any other ideas? Do I try for another brand or just use an external.